I am a Nutritionist (who counts Carrot Cake as one of my five a day) in London who is stamping stigma out of mental illness. Also interested in all things mental health related.
Follow me on Twitter: @mirandasmurmurs and Instagram: @mirandabunting

Saturday, 8 December 2012

Recently - Ruby Wax gave a talk at the Anna Freud Centreon Mental Health. She posted it on her blog and I have re-posted it here as its a talk that I feel everyone needs to see and read. Its similar to her TED Talkand essential reading for anyone linked to the world of Mental Health.

I’m not going to harp on about depression, people glaze
over, you can see them going “oh here she goes again yabbing on about the
darkness. I know when I’ve told anyone that I’ve got it, I get a few
phone calls telling me to perk up - perk up, I didn’t think of that. It’s just
not to be discussed. Once you couldn’t say gay, before that the c word
(cancer), then a long time ago you couldn’t even mention you were a witch – this
is the latest taboo.

And this isn’t something that happens to a small
minority it’s up to 1 in 4 of us, so where is everyone?

1234 it could be you or you or if it’s not you it’s probably
a relative or a husband, everyone knows one.

Thanks to the stigma a lot of shame comes with the package. I
have friends who say “Show me the lumps show me the x rays” and of course you
can’t, so there’s even more shame cause you think I’m not living in a township
I’m not being carpet bombed so you get these abusive voices but not one voice
about 100,000 voices, like if the devil had Tourette’s, that’s what it sounds
like.

Some people think depression is what you have when you feel
sad or having the blues, it’s such a deceptive word. Depression and other
mental problems aren’t always situation appropriate; it’s a disease of the
brain.

It is exactly like what cancer is to cells and
cardiovascular disease is to the heart and you wouldn’t tell someone suffering
from one of those to perk up. Why is it that every other organ in your body can
get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

When you have a mental disorder you get a double whammy
because your brain has gone down and it’s ill but because you don’t have
another brain to make an assessment, you can’t tell. I mean if you had a spare
brain you could but you don’t. If you had a pain anywhere else in your body you’d
be able to identify it, not when the brain itself is sick.

And the only reason we don’t know enough about mental
disease, how to treat it is because brain research doesn’t get much funding -
It’s not as sexy a disease as some of the others. You can’t get Sharon Stone to
show up to do the raffle for this one, you can get Liz Hurley to raise money
for aids, Greta Scacchi to save fish but there’s a no show for this one.

What’s bizarre to me is that it doesn’t seem to be public
knowledge that everything, I mean everything, emanates from the brain - this is
why you laugh, cry, feel, love, hope, dream, want to vault or become a prime
minister.

And every single problem physically, sociologically,
globally and psychologically is primarily because of some dysfunction in the
brain, but now we have something that can be done about it. Now we have means
to look right into the brain, right into the mothership for neurological
investigation with MRI, FMRI, EEG to identify psychiatricdisorders and
then provide specific therapies.

Just to put it in perspective why research of this kind
might be important I’d like to read you some figures.

By
2030, the World Health Organization predicts more people will be affected by
depression than any other health problem.

It
affects more people than all physical illnesses put together.

Mental
ill health will soon be the biggest burden on society both economically and
sociologically.

Even
more of a drain on the economy is the fact mental illness accounts for nearly
half of all people on incapacity benefits. The official figure here is 44%.

The
World Economic Forum estimates that the global cost of mental illness will be
about 16 trillion by 2030.

The
cost to the economy in the UK is now around £70 billion a year.

There’s so much talk about the problems of rising crime and over crowded prisons. Again you might not care about mental illness but when you’re mugged or your house is broken into, the cause of the crime usually stems from someone with a mental pathology.

So what can be done?

Some of these costs could be reduced by greater focus on
early identification and intervention.

Neuroscience, through better understanding of children's
brain development, will be able to target specific psychological
treatments. And this is exactly what the Anna Freud Centre is doing and
has always done, working with children to try and prevent them from developing
severe pathologies in later life. But they want to do more.

Thanks to brain research, we now know that the brain can
change throughout our lifetimes that we aren’t set in stone as it was once
believed. We now know that our brains aren’t hard wired; now how we’re born no
longer determines how we are for the rest of our lives.

Our brains are capable of neuro-plasticity throughout our
lives, they constantly change depending on external experience; also by
changing the way you think, you can re-route the brain cells or neurons, break
habits and create a new patterns of behaviour.

Gloria Gaynor was wrong when she sang I am what I am. She
will have to change those lyrics but it won’t be so easy to dance to, what
rhymes with neuroplasticity?

The enormous support for research in the cure for cancer has
had the result that oncologists have been able to target specific cancers with
specific therapies and recommend preventions, and what has been accomplished is
astonishing.

If mental health research was at this level, clinicians
would be able to understand more about brain functions, especially how the
brain is effected by a neglected and damaging childhood. Imagine how this
necessary research might not just save lives, cut crime, improve the economy,
diminish suicides, decrease drug and alcohol addiction, reduce heart disease
and last but not least, make life less tortuous for the 1 in 4.

Before we point our fingers at politicians for making us
suffer, or thinking our problems will be over if we sort out the ice cap
melting, global conflict, taxes, corruption, phone hacking let us look in at
ourselves, the problem isn’t out there, we are the emergency. We are not the victims
we are the perpetrators. If we can learn about ourselves, how our brain
actually shapes our behaviour and what we can do about it, only then can we
find the solution to everything. It’s all in our heads.

By looking after our children’s minds, the Anna Freud Centre
can help all of us shape a better society.